Accusation (10 page)

Yeah, it’s a very sad story, Sem Le said. Terrible. The allegations are of profound mistreatment. Physical and sexual abuse. Working under unsafe conditions. Failure to pay a basic wage. Are you writing about this?

Part of her floated, suspended, as Raymond Renaud contracted in front of her. Possibly. He’s from here originally, the circus founder, and is he —

Yeah, he’s the one they’re alleging did these things, Renaud, the bloke who runs the circus.

Confirmation made her heart race. Did they say these, all these things occurred on an ongoing basis?

We’re trying to pin down details. Their English is not great. We have a translator working with them. And a counsellor. They called me in, yeah, after they took off. I’ve worked with a few prominent cases, but never so many at once. Kids running from a circus, not to a circus. They’re in shock. Pro bono, but how could I say no to that?

Where are they now?

Still in Sydney. There’s a church group helping them that works with asylum seekers. It’s a challenge because there’s so many of them. Six boys, three girls. And for the moment they can’t work. The older ones. And they have no money. We’re thinking of moving them to Melbourne, where there’s more of an Ethiopian community.

And they’re all making these allegations?

Yeah. So far. Sounds like there was something nasty going on over there. Looks good from the outside, but they’re trapped under this bloke’s thumb. This is what they’ve told me. Tragic, really. They’re quite shaken up. Obviously we’ll be working closely with the Ethiopian authorities.

Was it hard for them to get away? Given there’s so many of them.

They waited until the night before they were to fly back, then had to choose their moment. Naturally he was keeping a close eye on them. They couldn’t take anything with them in case he spotted them. They were all in the same hotel. Two of the boys did run into him, the director, in the elevator, and had to act like nothing was on. Three of them got out in the service elevator and spent the night in a park. One of the others saw him in the lobby and had to hide and did a runner anyway. The girls caught a cab and ended up at a hostel. The rest of the boys spent the night at the coach station.

And they knew how to make an asylum claim?

I believe they had some contact with people beforehand who told them what to do.

Is one of the girls a contortionist?

A what?

In the circus, in their acts, there’s one who’s particularly flexible —

So you’ve seen them?

I saw them perform once.

Well, I don’t know that.

Would it be possible to talk to any of them about what they went through?

No, Sem Le said. They won’t be giving interviews.

Sara set down the phone and unclenched the hand that had been cinched around the receiver and went on listening in the silence to what she had just heard. Had the older ones fled because they were the only ones able to get away? Across the world, they moved into a new day, circus-less, perhaps still clad in clothes that smelled of home, and Sem Le, their champion, whom she imagined as compact and stocky, rose briskly from his desk, smacked his hands, or called out to his receptionist, or once more grabbed the ringing phone.

She had the number of the woman who ran the Sydney Alternative Arts Festival beside her. After Sara introduced herself, Holly Mercury’s assistant said, I’m sorry, she’s not available, with the air of one distracted by someone else vying for her attention. Just a moment, please. The line clicked into a hold, and then an older woman’s voice came on, blunt and low, and identified herself as Holly Mercury.

I’d like to make a few things clear, all right? There were absolutely no rumours preceding their arrival. They played in festivals across Europe, and I had no word of any issues. And there was no sign of any inappropriate behaviour while they were here. They were here for a week, and in Melbourne and Adelaide before that. Also, I had very little contact with them. I saw them in rehearsal once and on opening night, and then I happened to be at the hotel to say goodbye when he found out they’d taken off. He was trying to round them all up, there was a bus waiting, it was chaos. One of the others told him they’d split. I suppose some of them must have known.

What did he do?

He seemed shocked. He had to get the others to the airport. I told him I’d see what I could do to help. This was before I got word from the police and their legal agent.

So there had, Sara thought, been this much planning. To bolt on the verge of their return to Ethiopia left Raymond Renaud no time to track down the runaways before he had to race to catch a plane with the rest of the children. They had known to make an asylum claim: someone at some point had told them what and how. Perhaps they had been plotting their escape for months. In March, as she’d watched them onstage in Copenhagen, performing and taking their breathless bows, the idea had already been coursing through them. They had whispered about it behind his back. In a hotel room, behind a closed door, someone said, This is what we will do.

Or they had not considered running at all until after arriving in Australia: something had happened there, or things had reached a breaking point. Or,
or
— Australia itself had beckoned: the lure of taps that ran endless water and large TV screens filled with multiple channels and shops as bright and glittery as peacocks’ tails. All of this tugged at them. There was a leader. They had come up with the plan together. There was horror here somewhere but what kind of horror.

From downstairs came the thud of the back door being pulled tight against its frame, which marked the return of Kumiko, her basement tenant, without whom she would never have been able to afford the house. The house that she was glad to have despite the grief tied up in its purchase, the stability of a place that she could call her own.

In the kitchen, to a warble of Japanese making its way from Kumiko’s answering machine up through the floorboards, Sara poured herself another drink and, in front of the fridge, pressed an ice cube to her forehead, felt the sear of its wet cold. There had to be two or three legs to the journey from Sydney back to Addis Ababa, via Bangkok or Dubai, and he was trapped in his seat as he had been in her car, nine empty seats around him, the other children silent or upset or whispering, the rift between him and them widening. Would he have the strength or the self-composure or whatever it took to try to comfort them? Or had he willed them to stay silent, desperate that they not speculate among themselves. She had never followed up to find out what had happened to the paralyzed boy. Perhaps Juliet knew. Ahead of him: the calls or visits he would have to make to inform the parents of the runaways that their children had vanished. Since he was responsible for them. Either he had every reason to know why they had done what they’d done, or he had some intimation, or he was caught entirely by surprise. On the plane, there would be time to think. She rubbed the ice cube across her forehead. She had no idea how to think of him. On the plane, all he would have known for certain was that they’d taken off.

Drink in hand, she made her way back upstairs to the warmer second floor and her home office at the front of the house, where the coloured swirls of the screensaver made blue swoops across the darkening walls until her fingers touched the keyboard. When she searched, she found no news from Addis Ababa, nothing posted online from the English-language paper there. The press newsfeeds were full of thickets of postings about the Americans threatening air strikes against Iraq.

One night, sometime after his return, he would have answered the phone and heard someone say, There is an investigation. This is what you are alleged to have done. Afterward his clothes would be the same and the room around him and nothing else. She had seen him in distress, glimpsed his particular tincture of fear and rage. One kind of horror if he’d done what he was accused of and another if he had not.

He was out there somewhere, and something led from her to him. She rose to her feet and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. What she owed him was the space in which to be innocent without dismissing the story of his accusers. The internal juggling act was trying to hold both these things in her head at once. He was not charged with anything. Her body coiled in horror and disbelief and fear and compassion and with the desire not to judge, because legally it was wrong as yet to judge him, either him or his accusers, but him in particular because he was the accused and as yet only accused and in some small way she knew what this felt like.

Downstairs and out the front door, she took a seat, hugging her knees, on the top step of the porch. A breeze sighed through the maple tree, lit green from behind by the street lamp. She balanced the moist circle of her glass first on one knee, then on the other. The past came flowing back.

After her first police interview, she’d told herself it was natural that the police wanted to speak to her, since she’d been in the vicinity when the theft was discovered. And Graham had been offhand yet reassuring: it was a stolen wallet and credit card, a small thing. He’d asked about the woman whose wallet was stolen and Sara had tried to pull the blurry stranger into focus. In truth, she’d barely noticed the woman, maybe late twenties, not overweight but soft around the edges and frankly a little hysterical when she’d discovered her wallet was gone.

The day the two police officers showed up at their door to search the Westmount apartment, the first thing Graham asked, after the officers had left, was what address Sara had given them. He persisted: why hadn’t she used the address of the apartment on Saint-Viateur, where she kept a room at his request? Because, Sara said, it seemed a bad idea to give an address and phone number of a place where she didn’t actually live and never was. He was standing on the far side of the living room, her fiancé. She couldn’t believe they were having this argument, her mind full of policemen’s hands in transparent gloves working their way through their underwear drawers and cupboards and closets. The police, so callous and insistent. She wanted Graham to say: This is outrageous. She yelled at him: Aren’t you on my side? She had the alarming sensation of the whole world tilting sideways.

After she was charged and booked and allowed to go with restrictions — unable to use a credit card, not to approach within twenty metres of any of the stores from which goods had been stolen, including the two big downtown department stores — she took a bus back to the apartment on de Maisonneuve, which was still technically Graham’s, locked and bolted the door, and didn’t call Graham but lay in her boots and sheepskin coat and the cheap sunglasses she’d bought on the way home on the sofa that was also his, and in those moments the most stunning sensation had been her absolute loss of control, a vertigo of wondering what she had done to make Colleen Bertucci convinced that she was the thief, the police believe Colleen not her, the store clerks unwavering that she was the one, her own helplessness. Her adamancy that she had done nothing made no difference. Lying on the sofa, she began to cough and couldn’t stop.

All this remained alive in her. The catch in her throat. Such a thing could happen to anyone. Couldn’t it? Small things cast long shadows. Somewhere a raccoon shrieked.

The next morning, Tuesday, the streetcar that Sara rode to work was filled with children, teenaged girls in tiny kilts, small kids weighed down beneath oversized knapsacks, all of them chattery with the return to school. The newsroom had an autumnal buzziness, despite the heat of the day outside, or else simply a social fervour after the long weekend. People gathered, mugs clasped in hands, to chat about the American air strikes against Iraq
and
the royal divorce. Within the flimsy barricades of her cubicle, Sara swung a sweater over her shoulders and called Juliet at home, and Juliet answered on the first ring.

Keeping her voice down, she explained how the performers had fled the hotel at night and spelled out what the allegations against Raymond Renaud were.

All those things, Juliet said.

Julie, when you were there, I have to ask again, did you notice anything, anything at all that struck you as suspicious?

No, Juliet said, and I really didn’t feel like he was trying to hide anything from me, but now everything looks suspect.

What about your assistant?

I haven’t called him yet.

Julie, are there people I can talk to, in Addis, say, who might know more?

Are you going to write about this?

No. No. That isn’t why. I’ll pass on to you whatever I find out.

Maybe I should be the one doing this, Juliet said. But right now I feel so stunned, I can’t.

Would you be willing to show me some of your footage?

I guess. Sure. Why?

I’d be interested in seeing what there is to see, of him, and the circus. I’m curious to see what it looks like. You know there’s still a film to be made of all this.

Sara wanted to see him again in whatever way she could. She needed to sense if there was something crucial about him that she ought to have noticed. And, if she had missed some sign of deeper corruption, after spending all those intimate hours in a car with him, what did this reveal about her? Not to mention her uneasy sense of feeling implicated because she had helped him return to Addis Ababa and the circus children.

Juliet said, Only I don’t know if it’s a film I want to make.

Tomorrow’s not good, Sara said, but what about Thursday after work?

Juliet held open a glass door that led into the cool, dim vestibule of a small warehouse building on Bathurst north of Queen. Immediately behind her, a flight of stairs led upward. Sunglasses off, eyes adjusting, Sara stepped in from the heat, the outside air thick and sultry even though it was September and afternoon shadows were creeping down from the western housetops as the sun slid low in the sky. A crease quivered between Juliet’s brows, and strands of her hair, most of it clipped back, wisped about her face. In a black dress and little turquoise cardigan, she led Sara up the flight of stairs, through another door, past a small seating area where two sofas were set in an L, and down a corridor of closed doors to the one marked Suite C, which Juliet, shoulders hunched, unlocked. Inside the edit suite, the walls were covered in black felt, and metal shelves climbed up one wall, and there were two monitors, one set upon a metal cart, the other on a desktop. A blue-white tube of fluorescent lighting trembled overhead.